Last year in Fanfare 33:5 I reviewed a Preiser collection featuring the legendary French bass Vanni-Marcoux. His presence on the label was most welcome, given the relative difficulty of finding recordings of this remarkable singer. Now we have the complete Vanni-Marcoux on six CDs, at a reasonable cost. If that single disc whetted your appetite, this is the full banquet.

It doesn’t disappoint. Unlike some singers of his time who infuriatingly recorded a narrow group of arias or songs over and over, Vanni-Marcoux explored a fair range of his repertoire on records. Here are excerpts from a few of his great stage roles, including Boris Godunov, Arkel, and Don Quichotte. There are curiosities, such as his Don Giovanni, Leporello, and Colline; a small collection of Lied and chansons, including Schubert, Schumann, Massenet, and Duparc; many popular songs by Tosti and Delmet; film music of varying quality; and traditional French songs in Weckerlin’s arrangements.

What is lacking from these recordings is youth. Vanni-Marcoux was 47 when he entered the recording studio for the first time, and he’d been singing for a quarter of a century by then. (His final album was cut in 1955, at the age of 77.) We don’t hear the voice of the man as it sounded at its fullest. This is likely responsible for the fact that some record critics consider Vanni-Marcoux a singing actor, rather than an excellent singer and actor. Yet a close listening to these discs shows that he was capable of remarkable vocal beauty—when it was required.

A good example is his 1933 recording of Delmet’s popular ballad Envoi de fleurs. There’s no sign of weakness anywhere in the production. The clarity of enunciation is exemplary, as is the extended phrasing, so carefully shaded in a wealth of colors as dictated by the text. The result is an apparently insouciant song of some difficulty being sung with the same ease as though it were a casually spoken confession. Much the same is true of Séverac’s Ma Poupée chérie, Dihau’s Quand les lilas refleuriront, and Leroux’s La Lettre de Marsala. There is no question of vocal dullness, not when confronted with a manner that combines such intimacy with so much shifting expressiveness. Or consider his 1927 “Deh vieni alla finestra.” Immediately it’s obvious that he’s been placed too far away from that relatively newfangled invention the microphone, just embraced widely in recording studios two years before, draining his voice of overtones. Yet far from being a failure, the aria is an object lesson in several respects. There’s the beauty of the artist’s Italian, the scrupulousness of his line, the absence of any superfluous sound around the tone. The music is seductive and the performance chaste, the rake in perfect disguise.

Vanni-Marcoux’s voice had great reach as well, and achieved volume without any extra apparent effort. His Lieder has a fastidious charm, avoiding the mawkishness of some German recordings of his period, as his unsentimental Le Noyer (Der Nussbaum) illustrates. The Italian popular songs he recorded possess moderate warmth, but none of the sloppy, grandiose gesturing that many (if hardly all) Italian singers of his day, and since, have demonstrated. He lacked the lowest notes in the bass register and found the highest ones occasionally difficult—not surprising, given his age, though he sang such deeper bass roles as Ochs and Sparafucile while young—yet his breath support was strong, and his production absolutely even throughout his range. Whether it’s something as simple yet effective as Yvain’s “Les Loups” from Marc Allégret’s 1934 film Sans Famille (and wouldn’t it be interesting to see it if it were available for viewing?), or the deceptively light-footed parody of “Devant la maison” (La Damnation de Faust), there’s never any question of the artist sounding harried, or even breaking a sweat. Vanni-Marcoux had the gift to make everything he sang seem effortless.

The summit of his artistry, however, was reserved for his interpretative realization of operatic characters. It was this that won plaudit after plaudit in reviews of live performances, and it comes across vividly in his recorded work as well. His world-weary yet powerful “Elle ne m’aime pas” is so notable an assumption that one wishes Don Carlo had been recorded complete at the time with his Philip II. Massenet came to prefer the mix of pathos and righteous strength in his Don Quichotte to that of Chaliapin, who premiered the work. As for Vanni-Marcoux’s Boris Godunov, consider the Bell Scene, recorded in 1927. (It’s the first of two included takes in this set, and the master. We can surmise that something must have happened to damage it for the Gramophone Company to unusually fall back on the second take in later disc pressings—though this was a common enough practice after matrices wore out in the phonograph’s first decade.) You can see Vanni-Marcoux acting the part in the mind’s eye, so vivid is the thought-by-thought psychological shifts in his voice, the gradually mounting anxiety as Boris’s imagination takes flight. Nor is it easy to forget the audible terror with which he barks out his staccato questions upon discovering the ghost of Dmitri in the room’s shadows; or the piteous lump of humanity that remains, nearly quiescent, once sanity returns.

You won’t find scratches, editing bubbles, or off-swing content here, though the occasional distortion at peak singing levels could hardly be helped. An A-B comparison between Marston and Preiser 89728 reveals slightly greater treble filtering from the latter, with a bit more brilliance and freshness to the former. I find that Marston’s approach helps bring out the tenor-like overtones in Vanni-Marcoux’s upper notes. The liner notes for the most part follow the trajectory of the singer’s career in great detail, supplying casts, dates, numerous crisp photos, the occasional critic’s note, and anecdotal fact.

My enthusiasm for the singer’s recordings, and my self-evident pleasure in this release, make any final recommendation a given. Suffice to say that if you’ve enjoyed the excerpts of his work on Preiser, here’s everything Vanni-Marcoux is known to have recorded, in excellent sound, and for $12 per very full disc. If you haven’t heard him before, seek out those samples online, and be prepared to be impressed.

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